Helmut Kohl

Helmut Kohl (3 April 1930-) was the Chancellor of West Germany from 1 October 1982 to 3 October 1990, succeeding Helmut Schmidt, and the first chancellor of a united Germany from 3 October 1990 to 27 October 1998, preceding Gerhard Schroeder. Regarded as the main architect of the Reunification of Germany, he also was the father of the Maastricht Treaty, which formed the European Union.

Biography
Helmut Kohl was born on 3 April 1930 in Ludwigshafen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Weimar Republic (present-day Germany) to a Roman Catholic Bavarian family. In 1946 he joined the Christian Democratic Union, which went on to become a major political party of West Germany and the current unified republic of Germany. From 1960 to 1969, he led the CDU in Ludwigshafen, and that year, he was made the new minister of Rhineland-Palatinate. Soon, he rose to become leader of the opposition of West Germany, and on 1 October 1982, he was elected as Chancellor of West Germany, succeeding Helmut Schmidt.

Kohl presided over West German politics during the Cold War, during which East Germany was occupied by the Soviet Union, and when Germany was divided between the nationalist-capitalist west and the communist east. Kohl visited the German military cemetery of Bitburg in 1984 with President of the United States Ronald Reagan in a controversial move, as the cemetery interred several Waffen-SS war criminals that had been killed in World War II. During his tenure as Chancellor, he used the Ostpolitik strategy, in which he managed to have peaceful relations with Eastern Europe, avoiding any confrontation with the power of the USSR.

In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kohl sought to reunify the two Germanies, as the Cold War came to a close due to perestroika and glasnost. Kohl signed a social and political union with East Germany, unifying the two countries and ending the Cold War. His unification of Germany was a great step in the fall of communism, and soon after, he was one of the men responsible for the Maastricht Treaty, which entailed the construction of a "European Union", an alliance between several powerful European nations in the New World Order era.

Kohl was reelected as Chancellor of Germany in the first democratic all-German elections since the Weimar era in 1990, and he left office in 1998. After leaving politics, he became a sharp critic of CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel due to her anti-Russian stance during the Ukrainian Civil War, as he felt that she betrayed the tradition Ostpolitik strategy of her CDU predecessors.